Music, skating and slush puppies: Memories of the Magnum Centre

The Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine is in the process of being demolished. (Image: Daily Record)

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There’s something about the demolition of old buildings – the way you can see into half-ruined rooms, the paint still on the walls, light fittings and doorways still intact – that always moves me.

It’s like something living has been ripped apart. This is doubly so when it’s a building you've known well.

I found this out unexpectedly last week on a trip back to Irvine , the town I grew up in.

I was driving my mum and daughter down to the beach for a walk when we turned a corner and out of nowhere came upon the Magnum Leisure Centre – half torn apart, its insides scattered everywhere, great bulldozers moving back and forth through the rubble.

Demolition started on the Magnun Centre earlier this year. (Image: Irvine Herald)

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I’d known for a long time that the Magnum was earmarked for demolition but the sight still shocked me. Because the Magnum and I grew up together.

It was built in 1975 (when I was nine, the same age my daughter is now) and opened the following year, at the end of the hot summer of 1976. Back then, the Magnum seemed to us to come from the future – a hi-tech interior of glass and light.

At one point in the late 70s and early 80s, it averaged a million visitors a year. In terms of Scottish tourist attractions, this made it second only to Edinburgh Castle . Right here, in Irvine.

We parked, got out of the car and walked around the perimeter of the site. There, lying sadly in the middle of the rubble that used to be the swimming pool, was a foam float, the kind used to teach kids to swim, just like me and my wee brother learned to do in that very pool 40 years ago.

Just around the corner, you could make out what was once the counter for the snack bar in the ice rink. I remembered hobbling over to it in my rented ‘purple panther’ skates, as I’m sure an entire generation of Irvinites my age remembers.

It was impossible to look into the remains of the skating rink without hearing the songs I associated with that time blaring out: ELO’s Mr Blue Sky, Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and, appropriately enough given the quality of my skating, Elvis Costello’s Accidents Will Happen. These records making the date some time between 1977 and 1979, the year I became a teenager and began to discover girls and bands, there amid the deafening p op music, the flying ice, the freezing Slush Puppies (grape!) and the bleep and ping of the Asteroids and Space Invaders machines.

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Upstairs from the ruined ice rink were the doors to what was once the cinema where, in 1981, at the age of 15, I took my first proper girlfriend Karen Gillies (and hi Karen, wherever you are, hope you’re well) to see Gregory’s Girl.

Further along, you could see where the indoor crown bowling green was, where my dad would sit while we were in the pool.

And, next to it, what was once the huge sports hall, much of the brown brickwork now lying in piles. Those bricks, I thought, the sounds they absorbed in the 80s, when the Magnum became one of Scotland’s premier live music venues. Madness, Thin Lizzy and The Jam all played there in 1981 alone.

The Magnum Centre played host to some massive gigs in the 70s and 80s.

I stood and gazed forlornly at the approximate spot where, in the summer of 1982, shortly after my 16th birthday, I witnessed the greatest gig I’d seen – The Clash on their Combat Rock tour. They came on and leapt what seemed like 10ft into the air on the downbeat of the opening song London Calling, the line about “the faraway towns…” never having felt so appropriate here in Irvine.

I spent the entire two-and-a-half-hour set crammed at the front of the stage between Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, utterly soaked with sweat on a hot July night. I didn’t know it at the time (what do you know when you’re 16?) but it would be the greatest gig I’d ever see.

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We all went to see Chuck Berry in the same hall the following year. He was well past his prime in 1983, hacking it out for cash with a pickup band but, hey, it was Chuck Berry. The inventor of rock and roll. Right there in our little town. A few years later, in 1985, I took my 12-year-old sister to her first ever gig at the Magnum: The Smiths. (Man, you owe me for that, Linda. It could have been Bucks Fizz or Wham! if I’d left you to your own devices.)

Morrissey of The Smiths playing at the Magnum Centre 1985.

And so I stood there on a wet, blustery August morning, looking at the ruins and listening to the crunch of the bulldozers and thinking about the past, about music and being a teenager, about my dad, my brother, Chuck Berry and Joe Strummer. All gone now, all outlived by this leisure centre in Irvine.